praxis program – Scholars— Labhttp://scholarslab.org
Works in ProgressTue, 13 Mar 2018 20:50:09 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4Crafting Our Charter – Praxis Program 2017-2018http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/crafting-our-charter-praxis-program-2017-2018/
Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:28:11 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13767Continue reading “Crafting Our Charter – Praxis Program 2017-2018”.]]>As a historian, when I think of charters, the first things I think of are royal charters.

The first result when you Google charter, on the other hand, is Charter Telecommunications Company because of course.

But as members of the new Praxis Fellowship cohort, my fellow fellows and I tried to chart (I’m sorry) a very different path. The result of our work, The Praxis Charter, 2017-2018, is the first thing we ever created together.

Transparency is one of our core values, so I am going to use this post to reveal the process by which we made this document.

Our charter’s first draft was written in a jam session in a Scholars’ Lab meeting room, and the fact that we are all teachers was readily evident. We privately brainstormed, we paired and shared those ideas, and then we had a class discussion with Christian at the technological helm. I often think of grad school as a lesson in liminality.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

That was on full display as we drew on the techniques we use to facilitate classroom discussions to jumpstart our own collaborative work. The liminality of grad school isn’t always to its credit, but in this case, the results were lovely. As a teacher and a historian of education, I spend a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. The pedagogy modeled here made my heart happy! We melded the skill sets of both teachers and students pretty seamlessly to create a productive partnership.

Our conversation always seemed to come back to values. Values are, I think, the core of this document. Of course, for every positive value, there is an equal and opposite disvalue. The opposite of humility is egotism. The opposite of flexibility is rigidity. The opposite of transparency is obfuscation. I think this connects to a comment my fellow Torie made, that writing this charter was almost cathartic, because we could list every problem we had encountered with group work and essentially say: not that.

This, of course, points to the idea of conflict. As our joyful leader Brandon Walsh noted, past Praxis cohorts have tended to avoid naming conflict in their charters in the hopes that their silence would prevent it from ever rearing its ugly head. Think of conflict as the he-who-must-not-be-named of group work, if you will.

Ignoring conflict didn’t really work out for the Ministry of Magic though, and I doubt that the academy fairs much better. My hope is that by setting out clear goals, values, and strategies for coping with conflict we will enable our future selves to handle disagreements with aplomb and grow from them, rather than shrink from them.

Perhaps the most radical value embodied in our charter is our commitment to “the creation of a participatory democracy.” Participatory democracy is an idea coined by one of my favorite historical figures, civil rights and feminist icon Ella Baker. Participatory Democracy embraces two ideas, “a decentralization of authoritative decision-making and a direct involvement of amateurs or non-elites in the political decision-making process.” Participatory democracy seems like the perfect fit for the Praxis Program as we are all relative amateurs in the digital humanities, and we have been given the task of working and learning together. It also just seems to fit our collective personality. When we talked about past Praxis strategies, we decided we didn’t want to divide and conquer the tasks ahead like many previous years had. We wanted to work on individual elements of our project together so that we could get the most out of our training. This would also allow us to commit to a truly shared vision.

In so many ways, a charter is a reminder of our deeply held values. We all carry around ideals of honesty and creativity, kindness and diversity, but writing out a charter makes you actually reflect on those values and why you hold them dear. Writing a charter allows you to reflect on what it is you like about collaborative work – and what it is you don’t, and then make a promise to yourself and to others to try and embody the best of what collaboration has to offer.

As for our radical experiment in participatory democracy, I can already hear people asking, is that practical? The true answer is: I don’t know. But Praxis seemed like just the place to try it out.

]]>Hello World!http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/hello-world-4/
Wed, 06 Sep 2017 16:47:33 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13727Continue reading “Hello World!”.]]>My name is Spyros Simotas and I am a PhD candidate at the French Department at UVa. This year, I am also a Praxis fellow at the Scholars’ Lab. In this first blog post I would like to briefly introduce myself honoring Brandon’s ice-breakers.

Brandon always comes to our meetings with an ice-breaker. Here are the three we have had so far:

Which is your favorite animal?

Which is your favorite plant?

Who would you like to have dinner with, dead or alive?

My favorite animals are elephants, my favorite plants are palm trees and if I could have a meal with anyone dead or alive, I would like to have coffee with David Lynch.

I like elephants because they are big, they make the sound of a trumpet and they care about each other. Despite their size, elephants do not pose a threat to other beings. They are also smart and they can paint. Has anyone ever calculated the size ratio between an elephant and an average-sized bug? Bugs are the most common wild life form we are stuck with in the industrialized and post-industrialized world. Domesticated farm animals that we use for food or pets don’t count. We are stuck with bugs both literally and metaphorically. Unfortunately, I have never seen an elephant hanging from the wall, or lurking inside a piece of software.

I have seen palm trees! The reason I like them is because of their simple shape. Their trunk doesn’t branch out, it only ends with a crown of leaves, like a messy toupee. Palm trees are easy to draw. When I lived in California, I remember that sometimes, their tops would disappear in the early morning mist. Also, three cut out palm trees figure on the cover of The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry as a fine representation of their iconic hair style. Which brings me to David Lynch and his own impeccably messy hairdo.

Having begun his career with Eraserhead, it is hard to tell whose, his character’s or his own hair, is the source of inspiration for this electrified spiky hair style. Since then, he has created a lot of strange and heartbreaking characters. Joseph Merrick’s story, better known as The Elephant Man, The Staight Story, not to mention all the characters from his early 90’s TV series Twin Peaks revived recently, 25 years later, for a third and final season. Thanks to his book on meditation, consciousness and creativity, I was also introduced to TM. It is a small book, called Catching the big fish, very easy to read and highly recommended.

As an ending to this post, I chose the following excerpt from the chapter “The Circle” where Lynch refers to the feedback loop between an art work and its audience.

“I like the saying: “The world is as you are.” And I think films are as you are. That’s why, although the frames of a film are always the same—the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds—every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it’s there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. … So you don’t know how it’s going to hit people. But if you thought about how it’s going to hit people, or if it’s going to hurt someone, or if it’s going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films.”1

I think the same can be said about digital humanities. Our public scholarship, experiments, code, teaching, and service, also reflect who we are and reverberate with our audience. In our first Praxis meeting, we talked about impact, trying to pinpoint the idea of success. But ultimately, we don’t know “how it’s going to hit people.” In which case, it is always useful to remember the well-known Marshall McLuhan scheme of technology as an extension of certain urges or desires. It is important to understand what is the urge that we are trying to extend because technology, according to Jonathan Harris (who also came up in our first discussion), can have “dramatic effects” on people. That’s why, he calls for “a self-regulated ethics that comes from the mind and the heart of the creator.” Finding our own common interests and desires as a team will help us define the direction we want our project to go. At this early stage, we only know that we want to work with data from the Library, using technology to create new interactions with the archive. But it is with the principles of love, care and good intentions that we embark on this year’s Praxis adventure.

On Tuesday, March 20th the Praxis 2016-2017 Cohort was awarded first place for their project “Dash-Amerikan: Keeping up with Kardashian Media Ecologies” at the 2017 Huskey Research Exhibition, hosted by the University of Virgina Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

They will be presenting their findings again in early May. Until then, here is the abstract of their presentation to wet your appetite!

Dash-Amerikan: Keeping Up with Kardashian Media Ecologies

In 2015, the season premiere of Keeping Up with the Kardashians was the most viewed Sunday cable program, out performing the series finale of the critically acclaimed television drama, Mad Men. Kim and company have never received the critical adulation that Don Draper elicited. Yet the Kardashians’ sheer popularity demands further inspection by scholars who claim interest in the cultural productions that reflect and shape our current historical moment. The Kardashians remain particularly important for their ability to normalize a matriarchal family structure and transform the traditionally private sphere of the home into their center of business, all while maintaining heteronormative assumptions about the objectification of women. Furthermore, their use of Twitter, Instagram, mobile apps, online blogs, and even tabloid coverage work together to engage fans in an unending advertisement for their show. Whether commenting on news events, promoting awareness of the Armenian genocide, or producing extravagant television specials, the Kardashian family has harnessed the 24/7 media landscape in new and unprecedented ways. The 2016-2017 Praxis Cohort examines the Kardashian media empire to reveal the discursive power of celebrities, fans, and their critics. To do so, we created a data set of every tweet written by a member of the Kardashian family, as well as every relevant US Weekly article, by using web scraping, text analysis, and topic modeling techniques. Using these digital humanities methods, we aim to interrogate constructions of race, class, and sexuality in contemporary popular culture and the pervasiveness of social media on our daily lives.

]]>Fair Use, DH, and the Kardashianshttp://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/fair-use-dh-and-the-kardashians/
Fri, 17 Mar 2017 12:21:46 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13335Continue reading “Fair Use, DH, and the Kardashians”.]]>This week, the Praxis cohort heard from Brandon Butler, UVA’s Director of Information Policy, who gave a fascinating talk on the evolution of copyright law and the meaning of intellectual property. He covered the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause, the rolling boundaries of public domain, and the shift from monetary value to cultural value as a metric in the decision of Fair Use cases.

Understanding Fair Use holds important implications for all academics, and the Praxis Program is no exception, especially given the subject of this year’s project: the Kardashians. Considering the Kardashians know a thing or two about how to make money off of selling their likenesses and names, it’s crucial that we understand Fair Use, as the Praxis cohort jumps into studying images and texts created by this family.

After listening to Brandon, we learned some key tenets of Fair Use like articulating the scholarly purpose of your work that uses original copyrighted material, proving your work has transformed the original in some capacity, and/or showing that the reproduction of copyrighted material does not inhibit the creator’s ability to profit from that original work. He also hipped us to the Center for Media and Social Impact, which offers great guidelines of best practices regarding Fair Use and the reproduction of copyrighted materials.

Over the past few months, we have collected Tweets, Twitpics, transcripts of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, US Weekly articles, fan fiction stories, and Instagram images to create our archive of the Kardashian media ecology. In an effort to maintain transparency and accessibility, we had kicked around the idea of making this archive accessible through the website we’re building. Now, we’re rethinking that goal, but forging ahead with a project that will rely heavily on copyrighted materials.

But what’s really at stake in engaging with their copyrighted or trademarked material? Let’s take a quick look at a recent example of Kardashian jurisprudence.

Last month, Kylie Jenner lost a legal battle with pop singer Kylie Minogue to trademark the name “Kylie.” For those who don’t know, the nineteen-year-old Jenner rose to fame as one of the stars of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and is the youngest child of the Kardashian/Jenner matriarch, Kris Jenner. She’s been on a reality television show since she was nine. Who can blame her for thinking that she should trademark her name?

And in the mode of the Kardashian family business model, Jenner wanted to turn her name into a licensed brand that she uses to sell her line of Kylie Cosmetics. But Minogue already owns www.kylie.com, and her millions of fans all over the globe know her simply as Kylie. According to a recent Billboard article about the case, Minogue has sold over 65 million albums in a career that dates back to 1988. Clearly, Minogue held something of a precedent regarding the use of the name. In other words, Jenner is influential and carries a certain amount of media power, but she’s no Kylie.

Although copyright and trademark laws are certainly different animals, it’s safe to assume that someone who tries to trademark a name might be interested in a project that is digging into and trying to map their family’s media ecology – the very essence of their presence in the world. They are, after all, a family who makes a substantial living monetizing their likenesses and names via copyright and trademark, establishing themselves as the embodiment of celebrity power in the process.

And if they are truly the current archetypes of “famous for being famous” based on curated images of themselves, then how do we think critically about the Kardashians without gathering these copyrighted and trademarked materials and, in some cases, reproducing them to further our analysis? Well, we don’t. So we will be reproducing some credited but copyrighted images on our site. Luckily, Fair Use goes before us.

Topic modeling is type of statistical model that sorts through a large corpus of writing through language processing algorithms with the purpose of discovering the broad topics under discussion by grouping together words frequently used in tandem. This method has been used in the past by scholars working on distant reading, a method of studying literature that aggregates and analyzes massive amounts of text with the goal of uncovering the fundamentals of literature on a vast, universal level (the opposite of close reading, which focuses on singular and often exceptional canonized texts).

How did we implement it?

Using the program Mallet (Machine learning for language toolkit), I was able to import the text files of tweets and run the program. The program resulted in two documents: a list of “topics” consisting of keywords, and meta data surrounding these topics. This meta data included the percentage of tweets that focused one each “topic” and a list of the relevant tweets.

What did we learn?

Topic modeling is often assumed to be a primary text analysis tool for digital humanists. However, the utility of topic modeling is more ambiguous. Where topic modeling may be an integral tools for studying an enormous body of law documents, for example, does it have the same utility for a corpus of tweets?

Key “topics” revealed by the Kim Kardashian tweet corpus included clusters similar to the ones following:

None of these “topics” are truly revealing. We know Kim tweets about her family, about fashion, about her personal life (Kanye West frequently appears in multiple “topics”). We know that twitter is a key place for the Kardashian to promote their show Keeping up with the Kardashians and this is blatantly clear in the multiple word clusters encouraging people to “tune in.”

The majority of the topics were simply variations of the aforementioned topics. One notable exception was “people armenian power join stand april truth bro real genocide armo pray proud.” We had known that Kim tweeted about her Armenian heritage and that the Kardashian family has been vocal about the Armenian genocide. What the topic modeling allowed me to do was find every tweet in which Kim mentioned anything relating to her Armenian heritage. It further allowed me to place these tweets within broader categories. Half of what I will term the Armenian tweets were also related to charity and activism tweets, using the same language and subject matter as anti-bullying campaigns. The other half of Armenian tweets were of a social nature, discussing cooking Armenian food, going out to eat, and discussing notable Armenians.

Everyone: Please call Speaker Pelosi TODAY at 202-225-0100 and URGE her to schedule a vote on H.Res.252, the Armenian Genocide Resolution

While topic modeling did not offer much in terms of sorting through the corpus of Kardashian tweets at our disposal, it did allow me to collect and analyze one specific thematic topic. After this preliminary step, however, the onus to continue to study these tweets and how they might inform our study of the Kardashians public use of their Armenian heritage is on us.

]]>Why Study Popular Culture? Why Study the Kardashians?http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/why-study-popular-culture-why-study-the-kardashians/
Thu, 09 Feb 2017 20:27:57 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13205Continue reading “Why Study Popular Culture? Why Study the Kardashians?”.]]>“When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.” — Andy Warhol

“In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” is without a doubt Andy Warhol’s most famous quote. Eerily predictive of the twenty-first century’s stars who are famous for “being famous,” this quote encapsulates the seemingly democratized nature of celebrity created by reality television, the internet, and social media. Despite his embrace of pop culture, Warhol’s oeuvre fits seamlessly into the Academy’s notions of “high” culture and specifically, “high” art. Even as Warhol’s work subverted the modernist cannon and the teleological evolution towards abstraction, this very critique cemented its value among cultural critics and academics, as well as the market.

Only recently, has the study of popular culture become an important touchstone for Academic inquiry. Scholars of media studies, material culture, and visual culture (a field in direct opposition to art history in concept, if not in practice) have certainly led the charge on this front. However, others in the Academy still question the relevance of pop culture and address studies of it with skepticism, if not disdain. And so the question still remains: what is the value of studying popular culture? Why should Praxis spend a year thinking about and studying the Kardashian family and their media empire? Part of our goal for this project is to explore this question in its own right, but in the meantime, here are four reasons why it is critical that we study the Kardashians now:

In 2015 the season premiere of the Kardashians was the most viewed Sunday cable program—notably ahead of the finale of AMC’s Mad Men—averaging about 4.24 million viewers, ranking it the number one Sunday night program for adults 18-34, and women 18-49. By ignoring and degrading such a popular program, we are not just looking down upon the tv program in question, but disregarding its audience.

Television, a medium based on repetition, reinforces dominant social meanings and prevailing ideologies. Reality TV creates the illusion of a false intimacy between spectator and subject through the repetitive depiction of everyday tasks and conversations. If we understand television as a medium that cements dominant social ideologies through repetitive viewing, Reality TV and its pretense of the ‘real’ reinforces these ideologies two-fold. But upon closer look at the themes prevailing throughout Keeping Up with the Kardashians complicate what we might perceive to be dominant social norms. The Kardashians have subverted the traditional family sitcom in favor a matriarchal family structure, transforming the traditional private sphere of the home into their center of business, while maintaining heteronormative assumptions about the objectification of women. Considering the popularity of the Kardashians, what can this tell us about dominant American social ideologies?

Studying the popular is political. Audiences often make and remake their identities, in terms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and any other mode of intersectionality, in response to the popular culture they consume. Those identities, in turn, inform their personal political choices. If we want to understand the political culture of any historical moment, we should understand its popular culture, too. And, love them or hate them, the Kardashians are popular. They constitute a large portion of the ubiquitous feed of mediated information that the populace consumes through social media, tabloid journalism, music, and reality television. While the definition of popular culture as the cultural activities of “the people” has been scrutinized by scholars such as Stuart Hall for its essentialist view of the binary between “the people” and “the elite,” the old Arnoldian meanings of the terms “culture” and “art” developed in response to early industrialization, mutually reinforcingthe aesthetic, intellectual, and social values of an anti-bourgeois elite class. By studying popular culture, by giving it space alongside more traditional subjects of study, we push towards eradicating this long established distinction between high and low.

As noted in the previous bullet, Stuart Hall rejects this essentialist definition of popular culture in favor of a definition which stresses a constant tension between high and low(and between the hegemonic and counterhegemonic). Popular culture is dynamic, constantly shifting from marginalized to widespread acceptance, at times assimilating into “high culture” or vice versa. This understanding of a dynamic relationship of give and take between high and low culture is especially important in the 21st century, as the internet and mass media have converged these themes, see for example, Lady Gaga’s Collaboration with Jeff Koons. In fact, the Kardashians are no stranger to the contemporary art world. Kim Kardashian’s book of Selfies was widely praised as a pop art exploration of selfhood and identity construction.

]]>Reading the Kardashianshttp://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/reading-the-kardashians/
Fri, 20 Jan 2017 15:11:57 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13135Continue reading “Reading the Kardashians”.]]>Have you ever wondered what it would be like to read the dialogue that passes between members of the Kardashian family on Keeping Up with the Kardashians? To have those seemingly intimate conversations and confessions in the form of a literary production that is open to analysis, interpretation, and text mining?

Me neither. Not until recently, that is.

Our Praxis cohort has asked this very question to find out what the Kardashian conversations and their fourth wall monologues might reveal about that the ways they control and create the narrative around their lives.

Of course, answering this question requires access to the transcripts of the shows. While I half assumed some KUWTK fan might have transcribed the shows already, my searches for this material came up empty but feel free to point us in that direction if you know where they are. Without such a trove, a few of us began searching for ways to borrow the closed captioning service from the DVDs. There are programs that do that, but one problem that immediately arose is that our library only holds the first season of KUWTK on DVD. True, we could ask the library to purchase the remaining 11 seasons, but justifying that purchase and then waiting for their arrival might seriously slow us down. Another potential problem comes from the sheer time it would take to download physical copies of the show. Again, time is a serious concern here since our tenure as Praxis fellows expires at the end of this semester, and we still have to complete some sort of analysis of this material.

Following a brief search of other options, Alyssa Collins and I decided to try CCExtractor, a program that allows the collection of closed captioning transcripts from streaming services and hosts it’s code in GitHub. Not only would this save us the time and money required to gather transcripts from DVDs, but it also offered us a way to practice the technical skills we’ve been developing in Praxis.

Alyssa and I jumped into CCExtractor, simply following the tutorial available on their website and using the documentation provided in their GitHub repository. We used my computer since I had installed Homebrew already. This allowed us to substitute “brew” for “apt-get” in the command line and run the CCExtractor scripts. After a few hiccups, which we overcame with the assistance of Eric Rochester and Jeremy Boggs (thanks!), we downloaded the closed captioning transcripts for KUWTK’s first episode, titled “I’m Watching You” and originally aired on October 14, 2007, into srt and vtt files. We then opened the vtt file with Atom and had the entire transcript in a readable form, complete with time stamps for each person’s line.

What will we do with this information? I don’t have an answer for that yet, but just looking at the data opened up a lot of questions. Who speaks the most for the Kardashians? Does this speaking time correlate to on-screen time? In other words, are there family members who appear with regularity but don’t speak? How can we use this text material to consider the literary devices at work in an episode of reality television? There are a lot of unknowns, but I’m excited at the prospect of having this data to analyze.

]]>Working with an Archive of the ‘Now’http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/working-with-an-archive-of-the-now/
http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/working-with-an-archive-of-the-now/#commentsFri, 16 Dec 2016 15:28:16 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13086Continue reading “Working with an Archive of the ‘Now’”.]]>Given our subject matter for the 2016-17 Praxis cohort, we recognized early on that we would be grappling with a very different sort of archive than we’ve grown accustomed to as humanists. Instead of the stacks, journal databases, manuscripts, and historical objects, we’d have to take a serious look at Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and Twitter. The following is a brief summary of some of our efforts with Twitter, a platform which we realized early on would be key in meaningfully keeping up with the Kardashians.

We’ve centered our thinking around Twitter because at first glance, given its relatively open API, the possibilities for analysis seemed endless. What we’ve found is that this openness is a bit deceptive. While it’s easy enough to click around and ask questions of our archive through regular browsing, it’s another matter entirely to start answering those questions quantitatively. It’s hard to turn data that you can see into data you can use. It’s one thing to know this intellectually, but quite another to experience the many roadblocks of a proper social media data set.

The first thing we found in attempting to wrangle data from the platform is that Twitter’s API prioritizes an archive of the ‘now’. One of the ways to sample twitter data is with the R package rtweet, which allows the user to search tweets based on keywords or user data such as followers, user ‘likes’, and retweets. Because rtweet and other tools like it use Twitter’s “streaming API,” which searches for tweets as they happen, the experience is a bit like trying to sip from a firehose. A query of the name ‘Kardashian’ on a given Wednesday morning yields output like this:

The CSV format allows us to view the data in a slightly more manageable format as follows:

To be sure, there’s more we could do to clean up this data, but to what end? Using social media networks to answer our questions about celebrity culture means making a choice. It’s either the comprehensive and immense archive of ‘now’, or some more carefully and narrowly selected data set.

We’re moving towards the latter. Indeed, our training as humanists has primed us to theorize and uphold the significance of the small data set closely read and applied. So what does that archive look like? It seems like a simple enough change; instead of watching the deployment of the Kardashian name across twitter in real time, why not focus in on key users themselves? Even if we were to make a generous coterie of, say, thirty Kardashian and Kardashian-adjacent twitter accounts, fresh problems arise. ‘Now’-ness is baked into the tools available to us. Our efforts to delve into deeper histories of this celebrity hit a snag about a year and a half back from the present moment; you can only reach back 3,200 tweets into a given account before twitter’s API cuts you off. The workarounds are either inelegant or expensive. Twitter is a uniquely profitable and profit-driven archive, and the analytics tools to reach back further than those 3,200 tweets are out of our price range.

But for our purposes, there’s a workaround somewhere between the streaming API’s technical affordances and the browser’s ease of use. It is possible to reach back into twitter’s deep archives simply using the site’s search feature, where users can search for tweets by user across certain date ranges, all of the way back to a user’s first tweets. These, in turn, can be scraped from the web and archived using a browser. The solution to our data-gathering questions, it seems, lies in moving between the user-centric practice of ‘browsing’ and the computational problem of data wrangling. Our efforts will involve translating the archive between these modes. To do so, we’ll have to rely on our best instincts developed from traditional humanist archives in tandem with the technical affordances and scalability of the archive of the ‘now’.

]]>http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/working-with-an-archive-of-the-now/feed/1Time, Twitter, and Keeping Up with the Kardashianshttp://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/time-twitter-and-keeping-up-with-the-kardashians/
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:54:42 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13070Continue reading “Time, Twitter, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians”.]]>We started this semester thinking about time and the ways time is structured, pathologized, and altered. And when it came to finding an access point for these questions, a project, if you will, we found it in an unlikely source:

Cosmo names the Kardashians as America’s “First Family”

Initially, as serious grad students, we were a bit resistant/hesitant to stake our entire project on such an unlikely primary source.However, after several elaborate, energized, and playful discussions, we came to the conclusion that Kim Kardashian and her family (a.k.a “the Kardashians“) are interesting set of figures who actively make and re-make their own history through a network of media platform (both new and traditional/”mainstream”). Because they loom large on the landscape of American contemporary culture and have connected themselves to so many people, the Kardashians are situated within a nexus of not only conversations about time and information dissemination, but also conversations about race, gender, and sexuality. For our cohort, the Kardashians also are an exciting place of research where we canpair intellectual play and rigor. So, eventually we all got on board.

Brainstorming Session

We decided that by looking at the ways their reality TV show, Keeping Up With the Kardashian (KUTWK), we can not only ask what it means to “keep upwith“ these people (what apps you must buy, what headlines you must read, what games you must play, and what places you must go to be a good fan/follower), but also (and maybe more interestingly) how “history” or cultural moments are visited and revisited through the conjuction of social media and television show. Moments are first visited in tweets that are happening IRL (in real life) and IRT (in real time) and then revisited after a period of three months or time it takes for production to complete an episode of KUWTK.

So this semester (and next) we will be asking:

Why do people like the Kardashians? What do they offer?

How does Keeping Up With the Kardashians move in and out of time?

This includes looking at “historical Kardashian moments” that seem to take up a great deal of historical narrative space. How are these stories told and retold? We think that if we pair two of these media timelines: Twitter and television (KUWTK) we can begin to uncover the way these narratives work together (or even against each other). Here are some possible moments we might look to:

The OJ Simpson trial (1994)

Kim’s sex tape (leaked in 2007)

The Kardashian’s trip to Armenia (2015)

Khloe’s marriage to Lamar Odom and his very public illness (2015)

Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out (2015)

Kanye West’s ongoing beef with Taylor Swift (2009 – 2016)

The robbery in Paris and the possible retirement of Kim Kardashian from public life. (2016) In the ten years it has been on television, how hasKUWTK move in and out of different genres?

How do the Kardashians publicly enter and exit discourses: race, gender, sexuality, and class. On the other hand, how are the Kardashians situated in these discourses by fans, scholars, and journalists? It seems that nothing they do is uncontroversial and considering the public response to events in the Kardashians’ lives is also an important to understanding how they fit into the American historical landscape.

Lastly, in thinking about the Kardashians we are interested to think about how their use and presentation of history funneled through different media platforms operates as a model for other kinds and forms of celebrity (both insidious and benign). How might we see their use of both mediums as a test case for the ways in which news cycles and history has possibly sped up in the 21st century?

We are excited to see what we come up with and we hope you come along for the ride!

]]>Why not build another digital humanities tool?http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/why-not-build-another-digital-humanities-tool/
http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/why-not-build-another-digital-humanities-tool/#commentsTue, 13 Dec 2016 17:50:24 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13072Continue reading “Why not build another digital humanities tool?”.]]>One of the recurrent issues I noticed when our Praxis cohort began discussing the meaning of the digital humanities was the field’s need to justify its existence. At the beginning of the semester, we read articles about digital humanities as a “tactical term” and the kind of institutional, financial affiliations necessary to sustain DH labs and staff. All of this background on the history of the field proved useful in understanding where DH stands within academia and why it has received so much recent criticism as an instrument in the further neoliberalization (insert your personal definition here) of the university. Scholars within and outside the field have noted, with some justification, how DH might further the financialization and quantification of, well, everything and how that might lead us further away from the inquiries that should ostensibly drive our intellectual pursuits in the humanities.

So, if there is this “dark side” of DH, then what does it look like and what can we do to push against it?

An emphasis on empirical, quantitative projects and the “mining” of data and texts has characterized many (most?) DH projects, creating easy fodder for critics concerned with the ever-growing reach of neoliberalism. These types of projects have served as the very foundation for many DH literary studies and have yield generative results into topics like genre devices, authorial style, and the history of the novel. But beyond yielding new insights into literary texts, these types of projects offered a way to justify the field of DH. If humanities scholars could use computational analysis to produce projects illustrated with graphs, charts, and numerical data, then perhaps the humanities could maintain its relevance in a political/academic climate that seemingly values STEM over the arts.

The other way that DH seems to claim its relevancy is by emphasizing the production of tools. Our own Scholars’ Lab staff has created new tools like Neatline and previous Praxis cohorts have developed Prism and Ivanhoe, making useful, open-sourced tools and bringing attention to the work being done here at UVA. Of course, there’s no problem with producing such tools and many will say that’s exactly what DH should do. The problem will arise if every DH lab in the world starts producing new tools for every new project. At that point, the future of DH might look a lot like the iTunes app store, more a marketplace of things rather than ideas.

So, will this year’s Praxis cohort create aslick new tool for the DH marketplace? You guessed it, no.

For one reason, our cohort simply does not have the time or expertise to build the coolest new tool on the web. Several of us entered this program with little to no knowledge of coding, web design, or software development. My goal is to gain an introduction to if not a handle on those skills while I’m here.

The other reason is political.

During a DH presentation at the 2016 American Studies Association conference, I heard a panelist describe the Internet as the “island of misfit toys.” I took this to mean that in a push for innovation and the need to justify the field’s existence a proliferation of DH projects have led to a mass of broken, unmaintained, and otherwise unusable tools. This stress on tool creation has fed into the critiques of DH as a neoliberal undertaking bent on the production of quantifiable and marketable results rather than the humanistic analysis that might yield more ideas than products.

Our cohort won’t be producing a fancy new tool, and that’s okay. But we will use existing digital tools in innovative ways and maybe offer inspiration for other scholars with similar amounts of time and DH experience to pursue projects of their own.

]]>http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/why-not-build-another-digital-humanities-tool/feed/3Praxis on Choosing a Subject of Study, or, How did we come to the Kardashians?http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/praxis-on-choosing-a-subject-of-study-or-how-did-we-come-to-the-kardashians/
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:28:04 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13068Continue reading “Praxis on Choosing a Subject of Study, or, How did we come to the Kardashians?”.]]>

Keeping up with the Praxis 2016-2017 cohort.

Unlike previous cohorts of Praxis, we did not have a topic or project assigned to us when we came into the program. Rather, our fearless leaders at the Scholars Lab took a chance. Our assignment: “time, temporality, go!” The first impulse was todirectly challenge the traditional conceptions of time, linear time. Our cohort, made up of scholars of English literature, Russian literature, US history, and European art history, came to the topic of cyclical time from multiple different viewpoints. Joseph, whose academic work focuses on music and collective memory, immediately grasped the nature of cyclical time. Similarly, Alyssa and Jordan understood cyclical time’s ramifications in memory, story telling, and formal literary construction. I, on the other hand, an art historian who works with ephemeral objects, objects that are seen by humans and then over time melt, break, and disintegrate… I had trouble wrapping my head around the concept. Once an object is gone, how can it be viewed and perceived by the viewer and human subject? After meetings in which we discussed Gilles Deleuze, George Kubler, Albert Einstein, among others, I finally found myself opening up to the fact that time, as we humans perceived, is a construction—one that I was having trouble removing myself from because of the conditioning I had received as a member of a western-centric, euro-centric society. As an art historian, my views had been directly—if unknowingly—shaped by the history of my field. Emmanuel Kant, after all, established the notion that time is something we experience. A key step to this breakthrough was our discussion of the density of time and brainstorming its many variations:

– literary time

– cinematic time

– visual time

– collective memory

– nostalgia

As a group, we kept coming back to the topic of collective memory and nostalgia. Where was the line between the two? Was nostalgia a conservative form of collective memory? The concept of “radical nostalgia” challenged this notion. Radical, or insurgent, nostalgia, reframes nostalgia as an act not inherently conservative, especially when harnessing radical or progressive events and movements of the past (see Peter Glazer’s Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America, 2005). In our discussion, it became radically apparent that our own experience with the development of contemporary collective memory, how it was shaped in our daily lives, was the product of one dominant force: social media.

We were in the trenches of the 2016 election cycle. Donald Trump’s tweets were in the news everyday. Conservatives were accusing Facebook’s content editors of having a liberal bias. How was social media shaping how we perceived the 24–hour news cycle, and thereby our collective understanding of culture and politics? How could we visualize the social media landscape? How could we use social media as a data set? Was there a cohesive data set across all media that we could mine for a productive analysis of social media usage and its cultural ramifications?

Enter the Kardashian family empire. Reality TV, tabloid coverage, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, iPhone and android apps, online blogs… in many ways it emerged as a story of archive creation, expansive real time narrative construction, and yes, even a study of collective memory.

Who are the Kardashians? The Kardashians are an Armenian-American family living in Los Angeles headed by the matriarch Kris Jenner, who married Robert Kardashian in 1978 (divorced in 1991) and later the Olympian Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, in 1991 (divorced in 2015). The family first came to public attention in 1995, during the high profile murder trial of O.J. Simpson during which Robert Kardashian, was part of the defense’s legal team. They found themselves in the tabloids again in 2007 when a sex tape was leaked of daughter Kim Kardashian and her then-boyfriend Ray J. Taking advantage of such notoriety the family debuted their reality television series Keeping Up with the Kardashians later that year. By embracing nearly ever media platform at their disposal, the Kardashians have promoted their brand and developed their family narrative in real time, garnering interest in how they will ‘cover’ certain life events in their TV show airing months later.

Commenting on news events, promoting awareness of the Armenian genocide, while producing extravagant television specials, the Kardashian family has harnessed the 24/7 media landscape in new and unprecedented ways; their rise to fame paralleling the rise of social media and the internet as we know it.

]]>Discussions in the Digital Humanities and Learning New Technologies in the Scholars’ Labhttp://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/discussions-in-the-digital-humanities-and-learning-new-technologies-in-the-scholars-lab/
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 16:25:55 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=13063Continue reading “Discussions in the Digital Humanities and Learning New Technologies in the Scholars’ Lab”.]]>Over the course of the Fall 2016 semester, Praxis fellows participated in weekly meetings to discuss key topics relevant to the field of the digital humanities. At the beginning of the academic year, we considered the numerous debates about the definition of the digital humanities, relying on the collection of articles, Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016). Digital humanities, as an academic discipline, has been a notoriously tricky field to define, and conflicting definitions abound in the literature, leading to a vast range of ways that different people understand the discipline.

After our discussions and study of the digital humanities as a discipline, we began to learn about important technologies for digital humanists. Over the course of the fall semester, we practiced using HTML and CSS, as well as some Javascript. Praxis fellows were introduced to the Javascript library, JQuery, as well as the CSS frameworks, Bootstrap and Materialize. We also worked extensively with the version control system Git as a method for working collaboratively on projects. None of the fellows had used Git before, and after the tutorials and practice sessions led by Scholar’s Lab staff, we attained the ability to confidently use Git for our projects.

This semester’s introduction to the digital humanities has been has helped us realize how many ways that the discipline of digital humanities is defined, with some scholars focusing on social activism, some on technological aspects, and others on the qualitative analysis of digital media. Of course, the different angles of digital humanities scholarship can and do overlap and intersect, which make the digital humanities, as I see it, such a dynamic and engaging interdisciplinary field.

]]>Time and Praxis: 2015-2016http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/time-and-praxis-2015-2016/
http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/time-and-praxis-2015-2016/#commentsWed, 23 Sep 2015 18:46:14 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=12146Continue reading “Time and Praxis: 2015-2016”.]]>Time is a massive concept. If you were asked to think about it – how it works, feels, changes, what it looks like, how people go about talking about it, or representing it – where would you start?

As a person interested and invested in critical theory, my initial reflex would be to go to philosophers, phenomenologists – writers like Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and so on. Or check in with narrative theorists, think again about what Gérard Genette says about time and narrative in Narrative Discourse.

My second reflex would be to look at art and cultural objects. I’ve been trying to watch and/or reconsider as many time-travel movies as I had time for, everything from Primer or Donnie Darkoto something more straightforward like The Terminator. Sometimes you find something unexpected – for example, trying to untanglePrimer after watching it last week, Gillet (a fellow Praxis member) commented that manipulating time in films can have a certain scare-factor, almost like it’s a specific branch of horror movies. I’d never thought about it that way before. Time, and the manipulation of time, has the power to frighten us.

Also, games: like Braid, where manipulating time is the only way to solve puzzles and progress through the narrative. Or (at Jeremy’s suggestion) checking out Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year.

And of course, literature. I thought first to a classics like H.G. Wells’ 1895 The Time Machineor Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “A Sound of Thunder,” where tourist big-game hunters go back in time to kill dinosaurs, but (spoilers) someone accidentally steps on a butterfly and changes the whole course of history. Then to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse Five (probably because it’s the first book I ever wrote a book report on), where a character becomes “unstuck in time” as he dips in and out of his life experiences. Or even to something like Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 A Tale for the Time Being(which I’m reading for my oral exams), where relationships with past and present “time beings” might, in some ways, influence one another, even when those cross-temporal relationships are mediated textually.

There are so many movies, games, novels, short stories, poems, and plays I could go to here it’s nuts – not even looking at works with entangled narrative structures like the film Mementoor Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!(for example). These above are just the first that come to mind, each of which interacts with time and experiences time a little differently.

This is my first time writing here as a Praxis Fellow for the 2015-2016 year. Along with producing a charter, this year we’re all trying to think about time in as many different ways as possible, staying wide open with it and willing to explore any new possibilities, each coming at it from our own unique angle. Throughout the year, in our work and in posts like this, I’ll try to keep track of and share what I feel like I am able to bring to our work from my own unique perspective (apparently even if sometimes that means just talking about a bunch of time-travel stories I’m excited about). We’re only a few weeks in, and I can already say how excited I am to be working with the Praxis team and all the folks at the Scholars’ Lab this coming year. I can’t wait to see what we come up with!

]]>http://scholarslab.org/digital-humanities/time-and-praxis-2015-2016/feed/10Everything Is (Not Always) AWESOME When You’re Part of a Team!http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/everything-is-not-always-awesome-when-youre-part-of-a-team/
http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/everything-is-not-always-awesome-when-youre-part-of-a-team/#commentsWed, 08 Apr 2015 13:35:47 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=11847Continue reading “Everything Is (Not Always) AWESOME When You’re Part of a Team!”.]]>You have watched The Lego Movie I hope. It is a story about an individual who seems to be happy alone with his own routine as a ‘normal’ person, but one day finds out he is ‘the chosen one’ meant to save people. He does not believe in himself and his ability to be the hero. Nevertheless, he ends up being victorious against evil because of his great team. The movie ends with a song whose refrain summarized its conclusion: “everything is awesome, everything is cool when you’re part of a team…” Yes, I really appreciate the idea that individuals are social beings and heroes are the result of collective action. I value the emphasis on team work in this movie, but I would like to draw attention also to the hard work that goes into working within a team and as a team.

Getting involved in the Ivanhoe project as part of an interdisciplinary team has made me more aware of the challenges of team work. Working with my Praxis 2014-15 fellows and Scholars’ Lab staff/members on Ivanhoe has taught me several important lessons about being part of a team that I will definitely keep in mind for future reference wherever I go, especially if working on collaborative projects.

First, I have understood that what makes being part of a team totally awesome is people that are genuinely interested in helping you learn and grow as a whole person. My teammates and the Scholars’ Lab staff have been very understanding and flexible during my pregnancy and also with the arrival of my child. They can recognize that researchers are humans and life has to it more than research. They have made me feel supported and also helped me overcome what I would call ‘expert stubbornness’ (not only ‘expert blindness’ as my teammate Jennifer says in her recent blogpost). Expert stubbornness is when you try to do your own deep thinking and hard work to find the answer to a question before asking help from others. I tend to have a lot of this stubbornness, but the rule ‘if you cannot figure out in 5-10 minutes, ask somebody’ has helped me a lot in overcoming this ‘vice’. It made me realize the implicit assumption underlying my behavior: that experts know it all themselves and being an expert means addressing whatever issue without help, alone like a hero. I have learned that time is the most valuable resource and getting help is good for everybody. Thank you Scholars’ Lab for being a safe place where there is no such thing as ‘a stupid question’! You are always there to help us with questions about php, programming and the implementation of our ideas about Ivanhoe. And thank you dear teammates! I would agree with Swati’s recent blogpost: it is awesome to be part of a team that shares responsibility generously for failures and successes.

Second, I have learned how challenging it is to create a common vision for the project, given team members with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. Our discussions about the Praxis 2014-15 charter and the conversations about the conceptualization of Ivanhoe as a gateway to collaborative textual play helped us in this direction. Nevertheless, we still have unresolved conceptual issues regarding what could make Ivanhoe ‘special’. Having no clear resolution on several important conceptual issues, made being part of a team not always awesome, at least for me.

Most importantly, I have realized how challenging it is to make project management a shared responsibility and develop shared leadership within a team. Last semester I supported the vision that management and organization was a common responsibility of the whole team and it would have to emerge from our interactions as team members and human beings. However, when it came to practice, I felt frustrated waiting for such coordination to emerge. It took time to establish good accountability measures for ourselves and each others like delineating simple tasks, specifying deadlines, sending checking-in emails, etc. Grasping the whole purpose of Github and how to use it to facilitate team communication also took time. As a result, last semester we were not able to turn words into deeds and reflect philosophies into practices with a new Ivanhoe info page. This taught me to be more patient and generous with others and myself as work is not always fast and not always without tension in a team of experts.

Working within the 2014-2015 Praxis team last semester, made me understand the importance of learning more about project management and organization in multicultural teams. It is hard, but I think it is one of those things that can make being part of a team and working on a collaborative project pretty awesome. Managing a multicultural team and coordinating members’ actions towards the completion of a collaborative project involves special skills that also need to be taught. We think being a researcher by definition means that we are skilled in data management. However, we forget that our research generally as grad students and scholars is solitary work – the academy tends to evaluate individuals not teams. Furthermore, we may be good at managing data but maybe not so good at managing people.

I started reading about shared leadership in teams – where “the source of leadership influence is distributed among team members rather than concentrated or focused in a single individual” (Carson, Tesluk and Marrone 2007, 1220). Research shows that the development of shared leadership depends on two interrelated factors: “internal team environment, including a shared purpose, social support, and voice, and level of external coaching support.” (Carson et al. 2007, 1218). As I make sense of my team experience to this point, I think that the conditions for developing shared leadership were there. Yes, maybe we needed to develop voice more inside our team, and maybe a crash course in project management at the beginning of Praxis team work could have been useful. However, overall I believe we were able to develop high level of shared leadership. Our roles and responsibilities have changed over time, and it is in teams with high level of shared leadership that you tend to see such shifts and/or rotations in leadership, “in such a way that different members provide leadership at different points in the team’s life cycle and development” (Carson et al. 2007, 1220). As Andrew mentioned in his latest blogpost, our team has truly experienced the iterative nature of any collaborative digital humanities project. It is a challenge to know that it takes time to become a team, and still act as a team within a limited timeframe.

To conclude, it is not always awesome to be part of a team, but it is definitely rewarding. As sociologists Martin Ruef (2010) shows with his book The Entrepreneurial Group, entrepreneurship and innovation are much more successful when they involve collective effort and collaboration in the form of teams. Teamwork is hard but worth committing too. Let’s fight the ideology of individual heroes, geniuses, and lone researchers, but also let’s prepare for the challenges of being part of team. Knowing and learning about how to face those challenges will help keep collaborative projects alive and make working with diverse teams truly awesome.

]]>http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/everything-is-not-always-awesome-when-youre-part-of-a-team/feed/8Novice struggles and expert blindness: How my discomfort with PHP will make me a better instructorhttp://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/novice-struggles-and-expert-blindness-how-my-discomfort-with-php-will-make-me-a-better-instructor/
http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/novice-struggles-and-expert-blindness-how-my-discomfort-with-php-will-make-me-a-better-instructor/#commentsFri, 13 Mar 2015 17:38:45 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=11678Continue reading “Novice struggles and expert blindness: How my discomfort with PHP will make me a better instructor”.]]>It was my third blank screen. I switched back over to my text editor and tried again. I looked at the format of my PHP, looked at my functions. I looked up the PHP documentation, deleted elements that did not seem right, and saved again. Back in my browser, the screen was still blank. Last week, my computer at least gave me an error warning to let me know I had incorrect code. Today, there was nothing—even the static html components failed to appear. At this point, I had no idea what to do. I had exhausted my knowledge of PHP, exhausted my understanding of what to look for or how to fix it. After two straight hours, I was frustrated, overwhelmed, and tired, yet had nothing to show for the time and effort I put into it. It is the first time I remember feeling like I would and could never build the competency I needed to complete our remodel of Ivanhoe. I felt inadequate. I felt stupid. I made excuses that maybe I just was not ‘meant’ to work with computers.

Last week, Steven Lewis blogged about his own difficulties with our PHP homework. For him, the challenge is not that the PHP is completely unfamiliar, but rather than it incorporates elements of English that are familiar, though not used in a familiar or intuitive way. This is a key observation, for it shows how we try to make sense of the PHP based on our own experiences and cognitive framework. We see symbols that look familiar and try to use them and read them in a way that already makes sense to us. I have used this type of association in the past when learning new languages; in order to make sense of an unfamiliar language, I look for cognates or contexts and grammatical elements that look familiar based on my experiences with English. Of course, this process works better for some languages than others (for examples, there are less similarities between English and highly inflected languages or languages that use different scripts), but it nevertheless reveals how we learn by association and then application based on our established knowledge set.

So on one hand, I understand how this comparison of code to language can make PHP look deceptively intuitive, especially when symbols work in a way that is unfamiliar to our native language. For me, however, the challenge is less the code form as it is the logic behind it. The logic of PHP is more mathematical than grammatical, more literal and precise than our everyday language. This difference has been my biggest obstacle, for while I can memorize and regurgitate the system of code, I still struggle to grasp how all of the pieces intersect and how to solve problems when they arise. I still cannot apply my knowledge to new contexts, cannot see how one set of tasks are similar to another, cannot anticipate how literally the computer will process my command. Even the resources available to consult are new and unfamiliar; traditional experts and peer reviewed publications are replaced by flexible online forums with an overwhelming number comments suggesting alternative approaches and opposing advice. Last week was a low point. I was frustrated and depressed; I did not know how to start or even which questions to ask when given the chance. It felt hopeless and I had the strongest urge to give up.

I am familiar with the concept of “expert blindness,” but had always associated it with content, assumed that an expert knew so much information that they were unable to unpack it and introduce it in an order that made sense to someone new to the field. My PHP-exhaustion last week, however, expanded my understanding of expert blindness to incorporate not just information, but also skills. It has been years since I have been truly stumped, completely unsure how to even proceed, let alone succeed. Over the past 10 years as an undergraduate and graduate student, I have not only expanded my knowledge of my field, but also developed proficiency in the tools and skills necessary to analyze and present that knowledge. If I run into an issue with my research, I know who to consult, which publications to scan, how to read the plans and diagrams, what professional expectations to meet, and how to integrate that information with the vast compilation of knowledge I already have. In other words, I can apply my knowledge to new contexts and problem solve so efficiently that I cannot remember a time when I could not. My own expert blindness crept up on me, affecting not only how I learn, but also how I expect others to learn.

As an instructor, I have always tried to established clear learning goals and to execute them in a way that engages the students actively. I have constructed assignments to help them learn new vocabulary, develop their writing, and analyze the formal qualities of an unknown artifact. Looking back, however, I recognize moments when I took students’ knowledge and skills for granted because they are things I do without thinking. Most recently, I remember asking my students to analyze a building plan in order to identify different housing forms and, therefore, different eras of construction. While I lectured on these structure forms in class, the students’ papers revealed that some did not understand how to read the plans I introduced. When a plan shows building walls with varying thicknesses of lines, it is not at all obvious that other line variations showing stages of construction do not in fact display real striations or stipulations in the landscape. While I was able to revisit the topic in class after recognizing my lapse of instruction, it made me realize how much we gloss over–especially in lecture courses–and how easy it is for students to repeat that information correctly on an exam even if they do not fully grasp it. I wonder if my students ever felt as I did during my PHP exercises—confronted with a task or certain methods that frustrated them, throwing everything they had at it with no particular order or insight. I wonder if I then interpreted their regurgitation of my own words as deep and meaningful learning. How many students drop classes or majors because they were frustrated and felt they could never understand? Is there a better way to present course content, not to get all of the content in, but rather to ensure that the students come away enlightened and enriched by what they confronted, confident that they can continue to develop those skills not only as students, but also as life-long learners? How do we encourage them to ask questions, even if they seem too broad or simple? While I came to the Praxis Program hoping to gain concrete digital skills, I will come away with a renewed affinity with my students as learners confronted with something so new that it challenges them. As academics, it is often very easy to stay within the established bounds of our disciplines, very difficult to get out of our comfort zones in order to learn something (anything) that requires completely different skill sets than our own. I wonder if we should perhaps make this discomfort a bigger priority within the graduate curriculum in order to broaden our thinking as researchers and think critically about our methods as instructors.

My frustration with PHP is not gone, but my realization that this frustration is a natural part of the learning process–something I expect my own students to experience–helps me push through it. We are now working directly with the Ivanhoe code and the practical application of more abstract concepts allows me to see concrete results. By creating my own localized git branch, I have been able to play with the code on my own terms, to change something and see how it affects the site in a low stakes setting. But I never would have made it this far without the support and encouragement of the dedicated Scholars’ Lab staff. They have a willingness to repeat concepts, ability to recontextualize and reword information in personalized ways, and openness to my never-ending stream of questions. Most importantly, they have encouraged us to jump in, to make mistakes, to learn from them. While they have their own expertise in the field, their own “content knowledge” of how to do these tasks themselves, they have also developed what Mitchell J. Nathan et. al in “Expert Blind Spot” describes as “pedagogical content knowledge.” The former refers to their own competence in the field, while the latter underscores their anticipation of the learning obstacles of novices and their ability to structure and teach in a way that meets the needs of learners rather than the expectations of experts (Nathan 7). They do not distinguish themselves as experts from us as students; rather, there is the acknowledgement that they, too, were once where we are (including their own humanities background), that they have merely had more time to learn and master these skills. This self-awareness allows them to recognize learning opportunities and (dare I say?) enjoy them. At our first Praxis meeting months ago, Jeremy Boggs showed us the xkcd comic, xkcd: Ten Thousands. While I thought it was a nice mindset then, I saw myself exclusively as the character with knowledge to share. I recall this comic now and it resonates more deeply with my recent experiences; I am both characters at once as long as I can embrace unrestrictedly the expertise others offer me and recognize that I can offer expertise in return. Perhaps it is impossible to do either successfully without grasping the other. Regardless, there is no doubt that I will embrace both as I move forward.

]]>http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/novice-struggles-and-expert-blindness-how-my-discomfort-with-php-will-make-me-a-better-instructor/feed/15Something about PHPhttp://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/something-about-php/
http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/something-about-php/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 16:28:29 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=11643Continue reading “Something about PHP”.]]>We’ve spent the past month and a half learning PHP. It’s an arduous task only complicated by our own busy schedules. Trying to learn a new language becomes much more difficult when also trying to wrangle sixty undergraduates every week, or finish a dissertation, or find a job.

And yet progress continues steadily. The decision to sideline the redesign of the Ivanhoe information page was a good one in that it’s given us more time to work on the fundamentals of programming. Our development team has produced multiple promising wireframes of the redesigned Ivanhoe game, and the group is close to approving a prototype design of the game. The rest of us are in the process of researching WordPress plugins, hoping to find one that will provide email and social media notifications to players when someone makes a new move in a game that they’re playing. The goal of all of this is to make the Ivanhoe game responsive and appealing, something that people want to play.

Of course, all of this leads inevitably back to grasping the fundamentals of PHP coding. The PHP homework has been many of our single greatest struggle, lurking unfinished in some corner of our minds even as we made progress on other areas of our larger project. PHP is difficult to internalize not because it’s radically unfamiliar but because it’s similar enough to written English to cause repeated problems. For example, to express “and” in PHP, one would write “&&” rather than “&.” A typical line of PHP code is almost intuitive enough to write unaided, and is simultaneously just complicated enough to make an aspiring programmer throw up their hands in frustration. Mistakes will be—and are currently being—made, and it’s at times like this that we’re most lucky to have such a patient and generous Scholar’s Lab staff.

P.S.: Does anyone have ideas for great uses of WordPress plugins as teaching tools? If so, send them our way!

It’s a necessary shift. While we’re fortunate to be assisted by the Scholars’ Lab dev team—including Scott Bailey, a holdover from last year’s Praxis cohort—if we’re going to improve on the game’s workings, we have to be able to get in and make those changes, and we also need lots of practice in making those changes. Start any later, and there just won’t be enough time to develop skills or features.

But, as is often the case in academic study (as also, I suspect, in DH), this problem isn’t so much disappearing or even receding as it is mutating: taking on a new and more urgent form. In this case, that’s the design of the Ivanhoe game itself. Our hope is to take the Ivanhoe that presently exists and implement some of the features that almost-but-didn’t-quite make it in last year, while also streamlining the frontend with the aim of making players return to the game at more regular intervals.

In all of this, we’re holding onto the principles we had established for the Ivanhoe site, but couldn’t quite yet put into practice there: leaving as much as possible open to the players themselves to customize, so they can experience it in the ways most amenable to their own textual plays. We hoped to symbolize this on the site by incorporating an array of styles that would allow users to approach the website in, if not the infinite ways that we hope Ivanhoe will afford them, then at least enough that they can choose their own stripe of Ivanhoe. Of course, this means implementing these styles across multiple pages, rather than the landing page alone—this was the hurdle we were at when it became imperative to switch tasks.

We are at the point now of signing off on our prototype game design, which has been heavily informed by the conversations we had about the site itself. And perhaps it was necessary, if roundabout, to approach things this way. After all, the experience of a text is rarely smooth and never instantaneous. Why should a project devoted to furthering our textual experiences prove any different?

]]>http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/on-the-shelf/feed/6What Could Make Ivanhoe ‘Special’?http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/what-could-make-ivanhoe-special/
Sat, 31 Jan 2015 20:06:30 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=11440Continue reading “What Could Make Ivanhoe ‘Special’?”.]]>Last semester was not bad for our Praxis team. Our achievements were modest but considerable: a charter, a team with a common interest in any activity concerning food, plus a vibrant debate on redesigning the website for our common project – Ivanhoe. While we failed in meeting certain deadlines and charter objectives, i.e. having tangible visible results, I want to emphasize how productive the process has been for us in my view.

We had an exemplary meeting as a team to decide on a tagline for Ivanhoe. It was a successful meeting because we had a limited amount of time, a very specific well-defined task and an agreed process of making decisions. The most significant element of this meeting for me was free brainstorming and discussion of the logic behind our preferences and choice of words. The task in front of us seemed small -what is a tagline after all: put five-six words together and you’re done. But we did not underestimate the importance of this task. We considered carefully each and every word of the tagline, making sure that it reflected the ideas that gave rise to Ivanhoe at the first place as well as our vision as a team about its future.

Look at our notepad!
Within an hour of conversation, we decided to call Ivanhoe: ‘A Gateway to Collaborative Textual Play’. The key concepts we built this phrase on were: fluidity, interpretation, reflection, performativity, and collaboration. Our tagline draws a vision of Ivanhoe not just as a space with pre-established boundaries – a platform or a place of some kind – but a space that enables the emergence of boundaries, actors and places through play. That is why we chose the term ‘gateway’ and followed it with the preposition ‘to’: to indicate its initial purpose as an enabling environment for learning. As Jeniffer’s last post seems to conclude, Ivanhoe can enable learning through play. In the current version, Ivanhoe enables learning through the ‘role’ and ‘role journal’ features. These features require players to reflect on their moves/interpretations – before and after they complete them.

While I agree that Ivanhoe is a learning environment, I want to argue that this is not enough to define it and that we need to specify further the kind of learning this environment enables that other environments do not.

The existing version of Ivanhoe seems to emphasize one kind of learning – learning that results from reflection on one’s individual actions and thoughts. One might argue that this kind of learning through such self-reflection can happen everywhere and does not need a facilitating enabling environment like Ivanhoe. For example, commenting to a Facebook status or a WordPress blogpost also requires self-reflection – you have to think about yourself, your words and interpretation of a particular text – a photo, or music video, or quote from somebody’s book, etc. This is similar to what you can do in Ivanhoe.

I want to suggest that one way to make Ivanhoe ‘special’ i.e. to define its use as a learning environment, could be to create a feature that makes it enable another kind of learning – learning from others through reflection on the trajectory of play and the relationships among players’ interpretations. This feature could be incorporated within the existing ‘role’ and ‘role journal’ features. It would require players not only to reflect on their own individual moves before and during play, but also to reflect on the moves of others and the way in which the relationships between players’ moves shape the process of play and its end-result – an ‘Ivanhoe game’. The aim of such feature in Ivanhoe would be to enable a kind of learning that is difficult to achieve in other environments – WordPress, Facebook, a museum, or even a classroom: learning about others and how one’s interactions with others shape cultural objects or texts of common interest. This kind of learning could be achieved by requiring reflection in a journal – before, during and/or after play – about the set of relationships that contribute to the emergence of the text of common interest and define its form. I argue that Ivanhoe can become special if it is able to promote reflection about other players’ interpretations of a text and the interaction between interpretations that give a particular form to that text. I am looking forward to our team’s discussion of this option and the implementation of such idea into a well-designed Ivanhoe feature.

We have a tagline and we agreed that for us it is not just a statement about what Ivanhoe does in its current state, but more of an expression of our aspirations about what Ivanhoe can do. The conversation that led to the tagline creation helped us as a team consolidate our ideas about Ivanhoe and what we wanted it to be. However, we need to continue the debate on what Ivanhoe does and what can make it special as it will shape our future work this spring semester. I hope that the time we take learning new skills- html, css, php, etc.- will not be seen separate from the time we give to talking and reaching an agreement about the use and purpose of Ivanhoe – or how to make it special. I am looking foreword to more successful meetings this new year.

]]>Can Ivanhoe facilitate playful learning both in and out of the classroom?http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/can-ivanhoe-facilitate-playful-learning-both-in-and-out-of-the-classroom/
http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/can-ivanhoe-facilitate-playful-learning-both-in-and-out-of-the-classroom/#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2015 16:52:52 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=11345Continue reading “Can Ivanhoe facilitate playful learning both in and out of the classroom?”.]]>You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation –Plato

From the beginning of the year, the Praxis cohort recognized ‘play’ as one of the key aspects of the Ivanhoe experience. Yet, how does play shape Ivanhoe? What are the effects of this play? In previous years, the focus has been on the role of play in the classroom, but we considered from the beginning, as expressed in our Praxis Charter, that Ivanhoe might be useful, fun, and even educational for other communities as well. Is Ivanhoe relevant–educationally or otherwise–for established, self-motivated textual play, like fan fiction and collaborative creative writing? Is the original educational conception and identity of Ivanhoe lost if such communities do use it? Or does ‘education’ expand to include informal opportunities to learn and grow outside of the classroom? As we still struggle with the identity of our players, it is important to consider what exactly Ivanhoe does, how it does it, and for whom it is relevant. In this blog, I will start at the beginning: What is play? Can it be educational? How is it educational? Is it something that we can foster or produce within a formal setting? And finally, how does Ivanhoe provide a unique experience that incorporates aspects of both play and education?

“Play” is a term that seems relatively straightforward; it is something we have all done and something that we all believe that we can recognize. But, what does it really mean? In its most casual definition, play is defined by Webster Dictionary as a “recreational activity.” This definition implies that these are activities done for fun, for enjoyment–activities that are not work. This dichotomy between work and play, however, is ambiguous at best and misleading at worst. First, this opposition no longer reflects the realities of many people’s livelihoods, as the formal line between work and play is blurring increasingly in our age of ubiquitous connectivity, flex time schedules, and home-based employment. Second, by setting work and play in opposition, we imply that play is the antithesis of work and potentially classifiable as superficial, unproductive, and without purpose.

The concept of play, however, has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, especially within studies on childhood development. While scholars admit that play is a difficult concept to pin down in a concise definition, most acknowledge that it is often easily recognizable by those experiencing it. Yet, play should not be conflated with ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment.’ Researchers have argued that play can, in fact, be a way for people to explore not only happy things, but also things that cause insecurity, fear, and anxiety. Rather, it seems that play–whether scary or fun–is something that needs to be self-motivated, something that provides a sense of control through the choice to participate. In Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures, Jackie Marsh cites S. Millar in order to argue that play is not actually a thing, not anoun. Rather, “play is best used as an adverb; not as a name of a class of activities, nor as distinguished by the accompanying mood, but to describe how and under what considerations an action is performed”(211). Sometimes the choice to engage in play is determined by social protocol or relationship expectations, but it is, regardless, something that lets the player select his or her own level of engagement and participation.

Scholars who study children’s play focus largely on self-motivation as a way for children to explore places, activities, relationships, and physical phenomena within a safe, low-risk environment. In other words, play is a self-initiated, low-stakes opportunity to work through new information, recognize patterns, establish networks, and otherwise learn about issues and processes that concern the player.While it can manifest in many forms, play not only can be educational, it is educational; this form of education, however, is typically subconscious and based on experience, practice, adjustment, and even failure rather than memorization and formal instruction. Since players (rather than instructors) are in control of these experiences, it allows them to be spontaneous, flexible, and adaptable in order to account for new players or their own shifting interests and questions. That is, one advantage of play over formal instruction is that students can intuitively adjust the form of their play to account for what they have already learned and to explore new areas of inquiry.

With this in mind, it is easy to see how established, self-motivated textual play–such as fan fiction and other forms of creative writing–can offer important educational opportunities. Reading and writing encourage skill practice and familiarity with different ways to communicate and create meaning. Collaborative writing, moreover, requires writers to negotiate relationships, provide and implement feedback, and integrate critically new information into contexts provided by other contributors. Similarly, fan fiction requires critical analysis of a text and the self-conscious creativity to work within or push the boundaries of a provided context. Players can experience a broad range of awareness during these activities and many might not recognize that they are performing and practising such skills. Yet, the flexible time commitment, pursuit of a topic of interest, opportunity to experiment and create without potentially lasting consequences (like grades), freedom to change directions when needed, and choice to include (or exclude) other participants means that players maintain control of their own engagement throughout the process.

When Jerome McGann theorized the educational value of Ivanhoe with Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie in “IVANHOE: Education in a New Key,” he argued that Ivanhoe works “to promote rigorous as well as imaginative thinking; to develop habits of thoroughness and flexibility when we investigate our cultural inheritance and try to exploit its sources and resources; and to expose and promote the collaborative dynamics of all humane studies.” These are similarly the skills already being honed by those engaged in self-motivated textual play. The necessary component of Ivanhoe, however, is the active and self conscious role-play, for it not only requires students to interpret or reinterpret a cultural text, it requires them to embody it. This must be done self-consciously as players both internalize and synthesize (rather than summarize or describe) aspects of a text and as they negotiate and respond to the moves of their collaborators. While this performance can complement and even enhance established, social, and self-motivated textual play, our inclusion of a private ‘role journal’ in Ivanhoe to record motivations and justifications for moves challenges even causal writers to be more self-conscious and self-reflexive. As Sandra Wills, et. al., notes in her discussion of classroom role-play, such reflection is a key component to foster a deeper learning opportunity, not only to consider and recognize why and how a player does something, but also to practice communicating it.

It is clear, then, that play does provide advantages for learner-controlled education. Similar skills can, of course, be taught in a formal setting in a more straightforward manner so that the participants are fully aware of their status as ‘student’ or ‘learner.’ The question now is if such playful activity (and its self-motivating benefits) can be replicated in a classroom. Over the past few decades, a large corpus of scholarship and guides have been produced to tap into the educational opportunities of play for more formal educational experiences. Yet, if students are forced to participate in play or lack the control to alter the play to meet their own interests, does play loose its very essence and efficacy? In other words, does a playful game-like activity transform back into work when the student looses control? When it is required, formal, and potentially high-stakes in terms of grading? In a previous blog post, Andrew expressed this very skepticism of ‘gamification’ in the classroom.

According to Alexandra Ludewig and Iris Ludewig-Rohwer at the University of Western Australia, required and graded game play might, in fact, be limited in its efficacy. In “Does web-based role-play establish a high quality learning environment? Design versus evaluation,” Ludewig and Ludewig-Rohwer test the educational results of an established role-playing experience designed for language students. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, the role-play experience was designed to “encourage students to engage in self-directed and peer-assisted learning, involve experiential and real-world learning, incorporate resource-based and problem-based learning, include reflective practice and critical self-awareness, utilize open learning and alternative delivery mechanisms and also allow for freedom of choice and individual learning style preferences” (165). Yet, when the students were surveyed and tested following their experience, Ludewig and Ludewig-Rohwer discovered a great disjunction between what the role-play should have done and what it actually did (or at least what it did according to students’ expectations). While some students enjoyed the experience, many reported anxiety about the unfamiliar assignment format, uncertainty about grading, and no increase in language abilities.

While such an example seems to indicate that Ivanhoe might not be the playful pedagogical tool that we assumed, all is not lost! I suspect that the high-stake consequences of grading in the example above increased the students’ anxiety, while the discrepancies between the flexible application of skill and the more formal testing format made evaluation difficult. The sense of play was not absent in the experience itself, but rather in the uncertainty as to if and how it would be evaluated, especially for students so accustomed to an established format of graded assignments. We, as the designers of Ivanhoe, cannot control how players and instructors experience and use the game; however, we continue to emphasize performance in order to encourage playful, experimental encounters and reflection in order to facilitate self-aware educational opportunities.

In itself, the activity of role-play does allow students to control their level of participation and interaction in a low-stakes setting (that is, students cannot ‘fail’ at the game; moves build upon each other to form the burgeoning interpretation). Even if students are required to participate for a grade, they do control their role, analysis, engagement, and response to their fellow collaborators. Again, a student’s experience is dependent upon their own expectations and how an instructor introduces, structures, and evaluates a classroom game. The role journal will encourage students to make moves critically, justify their choices, and reflect upon their development. It, moreover, can help to initiate classroom discussion and to encourage evaluation on students’ insights, connections, and applications, rather than innate creativity. If this is done successfully, the students may not have ‘fun’ with an assignment, but will still be able to apply playfully the same skills as self-motivated players and better communicate the process of their own learning.

For more detailed examples of on-line role-play assignments and tips for evaluation, see Sandra Wills, et. al., The Power of Role-Based E-Learning.

]]>http://scholarslab.org/grad-student-research/can-ivanhoe-facilitate-playful-learning-both-in-and-out-of-the-classroom/feed/4Playing with toast: Our first Ivanhoe gamehttp://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/playing-with-toast-our-first-ivanhoe-game/
http://scholarslab.org/uncategorized/playing-with-toast-our-first-ivanhoe-game/#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 17:00:44 +0000http://scholarslab.org/?p=11301Continue reading “Playing with toast: Our first Ivanhoe game”.]]>We were pleased—and perhaps a bit surprised—that we completed our Praxis Charter so painlessly. It was both a test run to see how effectively we could work together as a new team and an opportunity to synthesize our many divergent ideas and goals for this experience. In terms of our work dynamic, we were quickly introduced to what will likely be a major reoccurring obstacle: our schedules simply do not overlap. We eventually did find one precious hour during which all six of us are available and we tentatively reserved it each week in case we need it. Generally, though, we developed a system that seems to work well for us: balancing critical, individual contributions with short, effective meetings. By mauling over drafts and comments independently before our meetings, we were able to make the most of our meeting time and plowed through our major revisions and concerns as a team.

The ease of writing our charter was likely assisted by our shared goals for the Ivanhoe platform. While acknowledging that we all want to gain something different from the Praxis Program, we generally agreed that our ultimate product —the redesign of Ivanhoe—should be open, engaging, accessible, and flexible in order to appeal to as many players and communities as possible. We do not want Ivanhoe to be a neglected platform or a mere requirement for a classroom assignment; our goal is to capture the original sense of play so clearly embodied in the early Ivanhoe games played by Jerome McGann, Johanna Drucker, and Bethany Nowviskie.

In our charter, we agreed that, “while committed to accessibility, the team will be wary of diffusing our attention among too many goals, platforms, or disciplines. We will do our best to focus on a smaller set of outcomes to be developed to completion.” Yet, this is easier said than done! After playing a few Ivanhoe games as a cohort, we began to consider how exactly we could redesign Ivanhoe to inspire the sense of play we desire. In our first Ivanhoe game,“Toast Sandwich,” which was selected for our shared love of all things food and cooking, we responded as various characters to Mrs. Beeton’s infamous toast sandwich recipe. We agreed to make this an open game with no rules or restrictions regarding roles and moves. While fun, the game itself petered out fairly quickly and we recognized a few obstacles that inhibited creative, interactive, and extended play. First, when making a move, we could only respond to one other previous move. While this did not alter the game directly (we could still write our move in a way that incorporated previous moves), it did limit how those moves were tracked and ordered by the game. Second, we were not able to see the previous moves while making our own move without opening another tab. This made it difficult to incorporate or refer directly to past moves as the game commenced. Finally, with no notification function, it was just far too easy to forget about the game. If no one makes a move and no one remembers to check for other moves, the game ends with little opportunity to resume or follow-up.

While not the best game, our play was nevertheless instructive! Already, we felt that multiple functions needed to be altered: multiple responds, a split interface of some kind, and a notification system are necessary to help facilitate intuitive and fun play. Yet, on the other hand, we also discussed our encounter with the formal design of the website and Ivanhoe interface, which seemed clunky and dated. Could we also incorporate a formal redesign to help foster excitement and desire to play the game? Could we design or display the games in a way that would make them easily accessible to those not actively playing? On a related note, there seems to be a need to build up a collection of documentation or example games showing how to play. One obstacle that we encountered was perhaps too much flexibility. Recently, Praxis Fellow Jordis Gjata grappled with this issue in her blog “Rules and Flexibility,” asking if total flexibility or more stringent game-like rules were needed to enhance players’ experiences.

So much for our focus on smaller outcomes! We quickly amassed a workload impossible to complete in our short time frame. To me, the question about which aspects we need to focus on is tied directly to the needs of our players. But, who are our potential players?! We talked a lot about the use of the Ivanhoe platform within pedagogical frameworks, targeted for classroom use and skill development. Yet, fellow Praxis Fellow Andrew Ferguson, in his blog “Steps Taken,” brought up a significant concern about the arbitrary ‘gamification’ of required assignments and asked if this forced play would ultimately diminish the playful atmosphere that we desired. As a result, we considered how a platform like Ivanhoe could also be useful for people already engaging in such role play and collaborative writing—not for a grade, but rather for fun. There is no clear path forward, as our next step seems to be enmeshed in the question of our players’ motivation: will we be creating a platform that helps to excite and motivate students required to participate for a course grade or that tries to entice writers and players already motivated to play to use this particular platform?

In an attempt to better understand the implications of this question, I spent the last few weeks researching what we hoped would the focus of the Ivanhoe experience: that is, creative play. Specifically, what is it? Can play be used for education purposes? Is there a way that we can inspire it with the structure or design of Ivanhoe? I plan to answer these questions in my next blog post.